How to improve your writing

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How to improve your writing

Everybody has his own way of defining good writing. It’s just like you and me have different ways of defining good food. Let’s define it as the writing that is highly readable and easily understood by most people. This article provides simple tips to improve your writing.

Writing is a way for the author to convey message to the readers. It’s wise to reduce the chance of communication failure. Writing in simple language and avoiding complicated sentences is a good strategy to let your readers understand you properly.

It’s a good practice to place your core idea at the beginning of your writing. Go straight to the point before adding the details. This allows your readers to quickly capture what you want to say and know the main focus of your writing. It’s fine to add flowery introduction before going to the main point, but try to keep it short. It’s confusing to make your readers walk around the bush before showing them the main idea.

Some authors are tempted to add many ideas into one article. That will dilute the strength of writing because the readers can’t focus on too many topics at once. If you have many views to share, break them down into a few articles. Each article should contain only one main idea. That keeps your writing simple and highly readable.

Simple words are more effective than buzz words and jargons, unless your writing is specially written for rocket scientists and health experts. Big and flashy words don’t help much in making your writing readable. You won’t want your readers to check dictionary every minute just because you toss thirty “high level” words into your article. Most likely they won’t read your stuff at all.

Short sentences are far better than complex sentences with unusual structure. Writing long and winding sentences is like inviting your readers into a word maze. By contrast, writing short sentences in active voice (subject – verb – object) is a powerful and simple way to express your idea clearly.

More is not better. A short article that conveys message precisely is better than a long article that conveys the same message. Word clutter makes your writing untidy, which breaks the flow of reading. If possible, cut down the number of words. Whenever I proofread my blog post, I always delete words so that it’s smoother to read. If you really want to write a long article, fill your writing with substance, not word junks.

Finally, we should keep practicing to write. That’s the ultimate way to keep the pen mightier than the sword.

Tagged as: article, self improvement, tips, writing